Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday May 17, 2017 @03:00AM
from the big-day dept.

MojoKid writes: Today, at its financial analyst day, AMD lifted the veil on a number of new products based on the company's Zen CPU architecture and next generation Vega GPU architecture. AMD CEO Lisa Su lifted a very large server chip in the air that the company now has branded EPYC. AMD is going for the jugular when it comes to comparisons with Intel's Xeon family, providing up to 128 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, which Su says "allows you to connect more GPUs directly to the CPU than any other solution in the industry." EPYC currently scales to 32 cores/64 threads per socket and supports up to 8-channel DDR4 memory (16 DIMMs per CPU, up to 4TB total memory support). AMD also confirmed the previously rumored Threadripper CPU, a 16-core/32-thread beast of a chip for the enthusiast desktop PC space. AMD's Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Radeon Technologies Group, also unveiled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, a workstation and pro graphics card targeted at VR content creation, visualization and machine learning. Radeon Vega Frontier Edition offers 13 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, 25 TFLOPS of FP16 performance and is powered by 64 computer units and 16GB of HMB2 memory for about 480GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The cards are expected to ship in June but there was no word just yet on when consumer versions of Vega will hit. Finally, AMD also shared info on Ryzen Mobile, which will incorporate both the Zen CPU architecture and an integrated Vega GPU core. Compared to AMD's 7th generation APUs, AMD claims Ryzen Mobile will up CPU performance by 50 percent while offering 40 percent better graphics performance. AMD also claimed those gains will not come at the expense of battery life, with a 50 percent reduction in power consumption, which reportedly will pave the way for faster, longer lasting premium notebooks and 2-in-1 devices.

Once Threadripper is out, AMD will have a consumer chip with more cores than Intel's top enthusiast chip. Intel's enthusiast chip with the most cores was the ($1600) 6950X with 10 cores, and a 12-core Skylake-X upgrade is expected to release in a few weeks. The big question is pricing on these chips. Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these? Professionals who REALLY need to quickly reencode lots of video at maximum quality, or run lots of Photoshop filters, can afford a $1600 chip. That $300 Ryzen with 8 cores will be 'good enough' for nearly everyone who can't afford to spend top dollar, otherwise you should use the EPYC, or the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.

I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

I would say that most servers most definitely use more than 4-core CPUs, it's only a small subsection of the Xeon line that have "as low" as 4-cores. 12-22 cores per CPU is the norm on the servers that I administrate which of course say nothing about all the millions of servers in the world, but anyway.

If you need large amounts of memory, depending on how the lower-end Ryzen 9 are priced, getting one of them may actually work out cheaper. With the 8 core Ryzen 7 chip you're stuck with 4 DIMM slots due to being only dual channel as opposed to the Ryzen 9 that supports quad-channel configurations. For a fixed amount of RAM you can therefore get away with buying cheaper lower capacity modules. Of course the price of the motherboard is likely going to be higher for the Ryzen 9, so that has to be factored in t

Not necessarily. I know this not for production but I just assembled a dual 14 core machine with 128 GB of DDR4 ECC for about 1100 $. That would be a 56 thread machine. Dead quiet too. Done parts off EBay some BWare but it makes a killer workstation

Considering he was explicitly talking about the value of multi core PHYSICAL CPU's I stand by my comment of him talking out his arse. As you mentioned almost no one buys CPU's for servers these days with only 4 cores in any serious businesses or enterprises.

Once Threadripper is out, AMD will have a consumer chip with more cores than Intel's top enthusiast chip. Intel's enthusiast chip with the most cores was the ($1600) 6950X with 10 cores, and a 12-core Skylake-X upgrade is expected to release in a few weeks. The big question is pricing on these chips. Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these? Professionals who REALLY need to quickly reencode lots of video at maximum quality, or run lots of Photoshop filters, can afford a $1600 chip. That $300 Ryzen with 8 cores will be 'good enough' for nearly everyone who can't afford to spend top dollar, otherwise you should use the EPYC, or the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

I'm quite sure the "enthusiast" line of CPUs only exists because all the work is pretty much done for servers. Even paired with extreme high-end graphics cards it's completely unnecessary and people who do the kind of photo / video / rendering / simulation work that can saturate 8+ cores are more prosumers than consumers. But it's a lot better for AMD to offer good value for some than to offer poor value for everyone and it's easier to justify buying something good you might not strictly need. I bought an 1

Nearly everyone has something to record digital video these days so there are a lot of "prosumers" who could use as many cheap cores as they can get.Also most programmers are finally dragging themselves into the 1990s and becoming capable of writing stuff for more than one core. We are finally getting to the point where single core speed versus price is no longer what people are looking for in a home PC.

if we do 100 2x4 core servers or 50 2x8 core servers it's still 800 cores type of thing

> I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.

????

Maybe if this was 1999 that would be true. For certain server tasks threading between more than a few cores isn't that important. However the server world has largely shifted to virtualization and in virtualization every core you can get your hands on is better. My builds for basic ESX servers at our datacenter for low intensity VMs are a pair of 6 core 12 thread CPUs loaded wit

Actually, you have that quite backwards. They've spent the most R&D for these high-end enthusiast chips, on the data center EPYC/Naples architecture which is where the profit margins are. It just so happens that a subset of these chips, when pared down a bit, also works for high-end enthusiast desktop. Ryzen 7 and 5 were developed for desktop. ThreadRipper was born out of Naples/server/EPYC arch, which as you noted is where the money is.

Even on the desktop AMD was good to add pci-e for storage and USB 3.1 to cpu die vs putting that on the DMI bus. The 16 for video is a little bit to much for 1 card other then maybe an very high end one. And spitting that to X8 X8 for dual GPU works.

Intel's Skylake-X with lower pci-e on some cpu's on boards setup for the full pci-e lane count is just raping you and it stated when AMD as not doing so good!

Yes, they call it the PSP. Platform Security Processor, I believe. I think there's some ARM core at it's... core.The recently committed to taking a serious look at the calls for them to either offer a way to verifiably disable it or to open source it. This was before the AMT fiasco hit, so I imagine they're motivated to actually do so to capitalize on the matter (assuming they are actually free to do so).

The non-typical* consumer may not need it today, but a processor like this is good for many years. Especially since the only thing really pushing hardware in the non-server department these days is VR. ( As long as Zenimax doesn't destroy everything with litigation greed )Give me a motherboard where I can put two ( or more ) of these into play and things will really get interesting.